Monday, June 12, 2006

How Bush defrauded the world and, in the process, murdered tens of thousands of innocent civilians

Bush had planned to attack and invade Iraq even before he stole the election of 2000. The public record is replete with direct, verifiable evidence of this as well as coincidences of the truly GOP kind. To wit:

Bob Woodward —in "Plan of Attack" —described a Saudi government offer of some $1 billion to the Bush administration for what were called "...joint intelligence operations" designed to overthrow Saddam Hussein by April of 2002. [See Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, Page 229]

Clearly —all the pieces had been put into place: the Saudi payoff, a "sweetener" to seal the deal, the pretext, the timing!

The Pretext

Bush's official terrorist conspiracy theory morphed into a world-wide campaign of disinformation, or black propaganda, involving the White House, the Pentagon, Britain's MI6, and thousands of outlets throughout the American media. The lie became a chorus —Saddam Hussein was or had developed nukes and posed an imminent threat to the entire world.

The timing is unbelievably convenient. Bush now held in his hand the pretext he needed: the Niger yellow cake forgeries. The weight of evidence and GOP coincidence supports the conclusion: Bush knew them to be forgeries at the time. Else —why "out" Valerie Plame?

According to Vanity Fair, there were 14 instances —prior to the 2003 State of the Union Address —in which C.I.A. analysts, the State Department, or other government agencies and/or officials who had examined the Niger documents, raised serious doubts about the legitimacy of the forgeries and were rebuffed by Bush-administration. The Plame case proves that Bush would refuse to hear the truth; he would punish those who dared to tell it. The Bush administration would commit treason in order to shut up its critics and it would rewrite a sorry history to cover up its crimes against humanity and the people of the United States.

Bush would try to discredit his critics with timed and illegal leaks; but Bush himself would brazenly claim to have made the leaks legal because he —the "decider" —authorized them. The magnitude of these crimes upon crimes is hard to sum up in a mere paragraph or two, an article, or even a book. But should any American still doubt the stain left by Bush on American history, the following two paragraphs are essential reading:

The story of the Niger forgeries is definitely woven into the major Bush Administration scandals - the fake war intelligence, the AIPAC spy scandal, the Chalabi-defector manipulations, and it directly spawned the Valerie Plame scandal. When Plame's husband publicly called out the forgeries, Scooter Libby and others "outed" his wife as a CIA agent, more or less because they wanted to "play dirty" to defend fake elements of the war propaganda, such as the forgeries.

The great Meta-Story – the major narrative, the center of gravity of the past few years – is the "core reality" of why the war in Iraq started, and its interesting corollary, the Republican claim that "investigations will make us sad and hurt America." More or less, all along, the plan was to scare the shit out of America and make the Democrats appear weak. This was done by planting fake stories about evil foreign menaces, and as time goes by, more and more details about this essential backdrop to the 'War on Terror' burble up from the morass of this young, dumb century.

Among the many lies told by Bush about Iraq, the "Yellow Cake" story is the most damning. Unlike Bush's false claims about aluminum tubes and other plumbing, that Saddam was conspiring with Al Qaeda, that he was making chemical weapons in a beat up old trailer with a hole in the tarpaulin, etc, the "Yellow Cake" story is one of a deliberate intention to defraud, to hoax the American people and the world. This was not a mistake, it was a bald-faced lie! The war was not a response to terrorism, it was a capital crime. Bush knowingly intended to deceive and mislead.

But whatever term they use, at least nine of these officials believe that the Niger documents were part of a covert operation to deliberately mislead the American public.

It is not an innocent error; it cannot be attributed to mere faulty intelligence. Rather, this was faulty intelligence that was sought out for its propaganda value. This was fraud with lethal consequences. Not a simple mistake of judgement, this was mass murder! This was a war crime.

"This wasn't an accident; this wasn't 15 monkeys in a room with typewriters."

—Milt Bearden, C.I.A. veteran, station chief in Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, and Germany, head of the Soviet-East European division.

Since Bush ordered the war of aggression against Iraq, tens of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed. This makes Bush guilty of war crimes. Much of the case against George W. Bush can be found in official documents —just as at Nuremberg —and in various verifiable items in the public record. Each death as a result of the U.S. invasion is, in fact, a capital crime under 18 S 2441. One day George W. Bush and other complicit members of his administration will be so charged.

The Crime of the Millenium

George Bush's war crime has been a disaster of unimaginable proportions. The war has cost hundreds of billions of dollars in "out of pocket" expenses alone. The final number will most certainly exceed several trillion dollars when disability payments, pensions, and liabilities are at last factored. By all reasonable standards, the U.S. is bankrupt, kept afloat by China, Japan, and Europe.

Bush's folly has de-stabilized the Middle East. Just as Ronald Reagan's vaunted "war on terrorism" sparked an exponential increase in terrorism during the time it was waged, Bush's war of aggression has made of Iraq a hot bed, a magnet for terrorist activity when there had been none in that country before the U.S. invasion.

Bush's war has forever stained American credibility throughout the world. No price can be put on credibility and no government can last long when nothing said by it can be believed. In the seventies, the label "Great Satan" may have been over the top. But what can be said to our detrators now that Bush has played into their hands and proven to the world that everything said by U.S. critics was and is true? If American credibility is not beyond repair, it is at least on life support. If it is resuscitated at all, it will take generations.

In the meantime, Greg Palast's new book speaks to the issue of motivation:

Greg Palast: Bush had a secret plan for Iraq’s oil. Make that, he had two, and I got them. It was not easy, let me tell you. The first plan that I found was crafted by the Neo-cons – Wolfowitz and the whole Rumsfeld gang. Their program for oil in Iraq was to sell off the oil fields. We have it in black and white. They called this privatization, which means slice, dice and sell. Of course, since Iraqis only have Iraqi currency, it wouldn’t go to Iraqis, right?

That plan was handed to General Jay Garner, our first vice counsel there. I showed him the secret plan and he said, “Yes, that’s it.” I said, “Why didn’t you implement it?” He said basically that he told Rumsfeld to take the plan and stick it where the desert sun doesn’t rise.

Greg Palast: They sent in Paul Bremer, whose sole qualification for the job was that he was managing director of Kissinger Associates. But the plan to sell off Iraq’s oil fields was blocked by something I didn’t expect – big oil, the big oil companies. They said: Listen guys, this isn’t how it’s done in the Mideast. You let the Iraqis pretend that they own the oil, and what we do is we have no-bid production sharing agreements. The key thing is to make sure – and here’s the kicker – make sure we don’t get too much oil.

I have the actual 323-page document drafted by big oil executives in Houston, working with James Baker’s people. Remember, James Baker represents Exxon Oil Company. He also represents the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. These are the guys drafting the plans – our plans for Iraq’s oil. By the way, why aren’t the Iraqis drawing up their own plan? That’s another issue. But the plan was that we don’t sell off Iraq’s oilfields. Rather they have lock-up agreements with U.S. oil companies. ...

Efforts to use former Nazis as spies led the CIA to keep mum about the location of criminals such as Adolf Eichmann.By ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published June 7, 2006

WASHINGTON - Determined to win the Cold War, the CIA kept quiet about the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s for fear he might expose undercover anticommunist efforts in West Germany, according to documents released Tuesday.

The 27,000 pages released by the National Archives are among the largest post-World War II declassifications by the Central Intelligence Agency. They offer a window into the shadowy world of U.S. intelligence - and the efforts to use former Nazi war criminals as spies, sometimes to detrimental effect.

The war criminals "peddled hearsay and gossip, whether to escape retribution for past crimes, or for mercenary gain, or for political agendas not necessarily compatible with American national interests," Robert Wolfe, an expert on German history and former archivist at the National Archives, said at a news briefing announcing the document release.

In a March 19, 1958, memo to the CIA, West German intelligence officials wrote that they knew where Eichmann was hiding. Eichmann played a key role in transporting Jews to death camps during World War II. "He is reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias 'Clemens' since 1952," authorities wrote. ...

AMMAN, Jun 5 (IPS) - These days, Ramadi is nearly impossible to enter. Against the backdrop of the Haditha massacre, IPS has received reports of civilians killed by snipers, and homes occupied with American snipers on their roof, while families were detained downstairs.

One man, who wishes to be known simply as 'an Iraqi friend,' met with IPS in Amman to describe the situation in Ramadi and detail recent events there as he saw them.

"To enter Ramadi (about 100 km west of Baghdad) you have to pass the bridge on the Euphrates and the electrical station for Ramadi. This is occupied by the U.S. troops. The checkpoint is there, the glass factory nearby is occupied by American snipers. Here they inspect cars and you will need more than four hours just to pass the bridge."

Reports from Ramadi have been few and far between in recent months, and always filed by reporters embedded with U.S. troops working in the area.

Witnesses interviewed by IPS in Amman provided a nuanced picture of the situation, one that is very different from the military focus of embedded journalists.

Their stories describe death happening any moment, without signals or warning. ...

The world increasingly fears Iran's suspected pursuit of a nuclear bomb but believes the U.S. military in Iraq remains a greater danger to Middle East stability, a survey showed on Tuesday.

As Washington campaigns to highlight the threat it sees from Tehran, the good news for the United States in a Pew Research Center poll of 17,000 people in 15 countries is that publics, particularly in the West, are worrying more about Iran. ...

WASHINGTON - The presence of U.S. troops inIraq is a greater threat to Mideast stability than the government inIran, according to a poll of European and Muslim countries.

People in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Russia rated America's continuing involvement in Iraq a worse problem than Iran and its nuclear ambitions, according to polling by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Views of U.S. troops in Iraq were even more negative in countries like Indonesia, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan.

America's image rebounded in some countries last year after the U.S. offered aid to tsunami victims, but those gains have disappeared, the Pew poll found.

Iraq is one of many issues that pushes a negative view of the U.S., said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. ...

Sometime in 2000, reports Craig Unger in an exposé piece in the latest edition of Vanity Fair, a current member of Italy’s secret Service (SISMI) approached Rocco Martino, a former Italian spy who had fallen on hard times, with a deal that might make him some money. A woman who worked in the Niger Embassy, Martino was told, frequently sold stolen documents that Martino might be able to sell to foreign intelligence agencies. According to Unger’s article, Martino obtained a cache of documents from this woman in January 2001, which he promptly circulated in Europe’s spooky underworld.

Martino now believes he was set up in order to pass the documents along to various intelligence services in Europe and the US for the Italians without being officially connected to them. In his article titled, "The War They Wanted, the Lies They Needed," Unger describes Martino as having a reputation as someone who sold secrets to the highest bidders, sometimes even double dealing. He was the perfect patsy, he told Unger.

Indeed, the crux of Unger’s article is that Italian spy agencies, in collusion with ex-US spies with ties to the most hawkish neo-cons in the Bush administration, may have orchestrated the distribution of the Niger documents for far more nefarious purposes than making a few bucks.

As it turns out, some of those documents had an enormous impact on the course of world events. They helped start Bush’s war in Iraq.

Unbeknownst to Martino, Unger reports, the aging ex-spy had passed on the infamous Niger forgeries that purported to show that Saddam Hussein’s government had made arrangements with the government of Niger to buy 500 tons of uranium "yellow cake" ore.

Dossiers reporting the contents of the documents quickly made the rounds of the various intelligence branches. But, according to Unger’s investigation, between their surfacing in January 2001 and the fateful January 2003 State of the Union Address in which President Bush used specific information from the forgeries to make his case for war to the American people, the documents had been discredited on 14 separate occasions by CIA analysts, State Department WMD experts, foreign intelligence agencies, current and former US diplomats, and others.